"Life is in colour, but black and white is more realistic." Wim Wenders put those words in the mouth of Sam Fuller, who played a cinematographer in Wenders' 1982 film about film-making, The State Of Things, his aggressively European response to his first experiences in American industrial-scale film-making under the aegis of Francis Ford Coppola. After learning that his embattled producer has borrowed funds from the Mob, Wenders' surrogate director Friedrich (Patrick Bauchau) is murdered - essentially for making a black and white movie. "What's wrong with the colour?" those indignant mobsters asked.

Such ignorance is still widespread today and, if moviemakers wish to work in black and white, they must often resort to subterfuge. The Coens shot The Man Who Wasn't There with colour stock, but developed it in monochrome, thanks to a loophole in their contract. That loophole was quickly closed forever. And when Jim Jarmusch made Dead Man, using the Daguerrotype-like cinematography of Robby Müller (who made his bones in black and white in Wenders's Kings Of The Road), the film's US distributors more or less strangled the movie in its prerelease cradle.

Rewatching Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), reissued this week and exquisitely shot by Denys Coop, one ponders anew how sad this philistine attitude really is, and what a loss it represents for a visually sophisticated audience. The fog-bound streets of postwar Wakefield and Leeds, the crowds at Belle Vue Stadium, the backstreet slums and pitch-black coal mines - all of these come down to us as clear and sharp today as when they were filmed almost half a century ago. Indeed, along with his work on Billy Liar and A Kind Of Loving, these tentpole movies of the British New Wave mark Coop as a kind of Raoul Coutard of 1960s northern realism.

The same idiotic conventional wisdom prevails that black and white film-making lacks an entire dimension when compared with colour. Nonsense: black and white is its own distinct aesthetic endeavour; there are things that can be done with tone, grain and contrast that are simply impossible - or, at least, far less satisfying - in colour photography. Film-makers with heft know this: Woody Allen, Stevens Spielberg and Soderbergh, Francis Ford Coppola, Jarmusch, the Coens and Anton Corbijn (channelling Coop, perhaps, in Control) have all made works of great beauty using the spectrum that dominated movies until the rise of Technicolor. And the instinct dies hard: film-makers forbidden the use of black and white by their producers have sometimes made colour films that drain almost all colour from the frame: think of The Terminal Man, 1984, Distant Voices Still Lives or Saving Private Ryan.

Like it or not, we are entering a new age of austerity, and it seems to me that one way to keep kinship with stark times might be to make more black and white movies. If it was good enough for Hitchcock, Hawks, Lang and Murnau, why should it be obsolete now?